In Focus Collections
Left-right: Raj Gill; Chris Warburton; Richard Kernick; Denise Crossley; Frank Horvath
Automation in some shape or form is being used in all businesses, but how widespread do you see the adoption happening across all areas of the collections industry? NC:We are certainly exploring automation in every part of our business – it is good business to do so. Here at PCA, we have a lot of bespoke
processes since we help consumers manage deceased estates, and what we have started to do is to build a lot of our own solutions where we think it adds value in areas such as estate planning and notification. This is also our priority in areas such
as post-handling and some of the more manual elements which we still need people in the office for, even in this current environment. We are also then looking at communication
channel choice and self-service options to see how we can complement the traditional methods of consumer engagement which underpins our business, with modern methods and thereby give more customer choice. That is one of our biggest focus areas for the year ahead.
DC: Almost all of us must be going through this process right now. The fact that we have all managed to mobilise ourselves at home will have escalated some of the plans we had in place and, because of that, we have had to adapt the way that we communicate with customers because, of course, their circumstances are different and we are all experiencing better engagement from customers because they are at home, and more easily accessible. But, on the flip side of that, we also have
to think about what that means for our own colleagues at home.
34 So there is good and bad, and we have
certainly spent a lot of time over the past year focusing on our self-service portal for customers more than ever. We are looking at what it is that
customers are asking for, which requires a manual interjection, and where we might automate that, both to lessen the impact on the administration resource, but also to improve the customer journey and increase efficiencies.
that and how it all flows through. It is very much a question of getting into the meat of it: before, it was very reactionary, now we are starting to see the industry become a little proactive, and that is certainly the theme I am hearing, which is: ‘OK, now we have some of the big items, how can we nuance it and create the right outcomes for customers’. We are starting to have discussions
I think that a lot of what we do in the financial support and collections space is very much built around a need for empathy and for human understanding, and to be able to identify and work with vulnerable customers, and we are a long way from having chatbots that can work effectively in that space
CW: Automation has been a big thing over the past six months to a year, and everyone has invested in it, but it seems to be going through stages. The first stage was that everyone was off-site and people were talking about how they could get staff set up with home-working. Once that had settled, there was much more interest in areas like customer self-serve. Now, we are starting to focus on
customer journeys and the implications of
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around how much things should be fully automated and where will we require manual intervention, for example around vulnerable customers, where do you draw the line? Those are the kinds of conversations that we are having today; it is more sophisticated.
BM: Technology and innovation has been key over the past year. We are finding that different parts suit different businesses. We have products like real-time speech analytics, conversational AI, and self-service, but not all of them suit all parties. Given the sheer size of our business
communication can be difficult but we have learnt to take a step back and engage with each other and these innovations have assisted us in doing that. For example, to learn from other parts
of the business, away from the collections sector. Because of the nature of our role in collections, where we interact with so many parts of the wider business, it was only sensible that we should engage with them all to ask how they do things smartly and efficiently. Collections can be an insular business,
but sometimes, we need to look further afield from ourselves, and take learning’s from elsewhere, then that has certainly worked for us.
February 2021
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